Imagining Querry

Ate Father George's heron for dinner,

but I mistook it for a rabbit.

Graham Greene went to the Congo in 1959, and wrote this down in a journal he kept for possible use in developing his novel about a spiritually exhausted architect, A Burnt-Out Case. Greene had, however, looked on as the heron was shot in flight, from the fantail of a river boat that morning; and this had upset him. When the time came to make a note, did he decide to test his suggestibility, did he decide to revise his experience, did he genuinely attribute the heron's texture and flavour to that default guess of vaguely chick-enlike non-chicken; did he flatly refuse to see the breast as a breast, vastly beyond the scale of a rabbit; did he feel like noting a mistake, not a denial, for the purpose of touching upon exploitive disrespect - indifference? Or was it his taciturn code for accep-tance of harsh providence, and determination to go on?

The reader is interested in the uses one makes of one-self; this I know. I discov-ered Greene in my middle 20s - having seen one's herons shot - and set about reading all of his novels, short stories, and the play. What draws a reader to Greene's travel journals, in which he is far from simply noting things - apart from their acute detail, irony, and recounting of risk - is his recurring evaluation of what is notable by the standard of the question, of what use is it to be a man?

We love stories - almost every evening, I walk through my library, whispering the appeal to be told one - and nobody confesses to an indifference to style; that simply would be unnatural. Greene was the ultimate storyteller in his language in the latter half of the last Century. Even now, for a matured youth, I don't doubt that he still proves an invaluable watershed jolt into adulthood. Childlike as one remains - for lack of any choice - Greene is the fellow who explains to us the energy we identify with being busy, by prying the question: For what?



I know the answer, I've given it. As an infant (the story goes, I was 2), I knew what I was doing on the ground at the north rim of the Grand Canyon. My brother came to ask me what this occupation was, I was so absorbed. I am said to have told him, I'm making rocks. Astounded, he said to me, You cannot make rocks, but somehow, he believed me, and ran to our father to proclaim what I was doing. 

Guys busy themselves, thinking we're surely making things. The United States is living through an epoch out of Herbert Spencer, whose infantile builder is a character in Ayn Rand, an architect who built for himself. Graham Greene had his architect, too, and went to Africa to find him, Querry, at work in a leproserie. 


The question of our use stays close, it is too bracing. It is the extent of the only pleasure we were promised. It can fall into disuse. It doesn't end.






Graham Greene
In Search of a Character
The Bodley Head, 1961
Penguin Books, 1968, 1971©


ii, iii  Mathias Lauridsen

The LTA Suite i

There are so many faces in streets and bars and buses and stores that remind one of Original Sin, so few that carry permanently the sign of Original Innocence .. 


Most of us only see resemblances, every situation has been met before, but [some see] only differences, like a wine-taster who can detect the most elusive flavour.

On a short holiday this weekend, I borrow from my library Graham Greene's delicious honeymoon romp, Loser Takes All, and find recurring references he never did attach before, to my notice - on wine, its relevances and the foibles of its followers. Here I admire how he shifts the ground of almost pathological discern-ment (the antitheses he poses, being so extreme) to the sympathetic standard of the senses and the sensual, with a lingering note of oppression. He was very, very good at this; belovedly dangerous, always.










Graham Greene
Loser Takes All
William Heinemann Ltd, 1955©
Penguin Books, 1971©


A. Brunier
S. Salomon

Graham Greene, "The Lost Childhood"

I remember distinctly the suddenness
with which a key turned in a lock
and I found I could read .. All a
long summer holiday I kept my secret,
as I believed: I did not want anybody
to know that I could read. I suppose
I half consciously realized even then
that this was the dangerous moment.



      

    I expunge the stain of

    remembering the Little

    Father and his Czarina

    beneath the White House

    Christmas trees, toying

    with children's dreams -

    as I recall a fragment

    from an essay in plain

    sight of every visitor

    to my home, every day  -

    who lets one trust the

    lessons we must learn.

Graham Greene
The Lost Childhood
  and Other Essays
Viking, 1951©

Suppose it were Friday cxli: Remember refuge?

The climes, here and there, whenever things

got rough, and one could burrow into a nice-

ly loomed blanket, or build a fortress, back

of the mulch pile behind the garden, where

the dog may come and go, and ask what's up.

Now we understand, the problem with put-

ting away childish things is architectural,

which is to say, budgetary. But who cannot

recall well enough, the 18th Century's re-

sorts of fancy, without asking what became

of them? Tristram Shandy. Tom Jones. Some

lexicographic flight to the Hebrides, or a

rake in his progress. Friday's release of

liberty feels more and more these days like

Graham Greene's dilemma upon the advice of

his solicitor, to evade a libel suit from

Shirley Temple, launching himself upon the

lawless roads of anticlerical Mexico - the

alternative to losing one battle, by gain-

ing unexpected triumph in another. On such

a day, now and then tiresomely framed by

a rogue sociopath, enabled by gruesomely

concerted monks of media, to immerse us

ever deeper into the marginalia of failed

states, who will begrudge a fellow his day

of release to a benign casino, a landfall

32 floors above the reign of paper towels?

Or are we to hear instead, that the author

of all our news, is not the author of all

our news? That would surely be pure evil.

Thomas Rowlandson

A view on the coast

  of Sussex 

1785

Metropolitan Museum

  of New York

Graham Greene

The Lawless Roads

1939

The Power and

  the Glory

1940

Armani nirvana

A Graham Greene satire from
the halcyon days of Fulgencio
Batista is not, necessarily, 
the likeliest interpretation
of the present charade - but
why not? Its foully flamboy-
ant polo club and expense ac-
count posh are so well mimed
in our sumptuously corrupted
epoch, that its merry premise
of prospering by pure falsity
needs scarcely to be stated.

Yes, but any playful allusion
subsists on such a stretch of
mirth that Our Man in Havana
only leaps to mind as sorely
missed in kilt-ridden times.














Graham Greene
Our Man in Havana
Heinemann, 1958©


Fernando Kodiak
Tom Bird

Portrait from a marriage: matching the profession to the estate

Mirth - not an experience so

often associated with Graham

Greene as it is with mascul-

ine disappointment in our Age

of Bob Dole - is what floats

to the surface as Peter takes

Poopy to Antibes, to dispatch his honeymoon chores. Oops. Yet, with aid of a pair of 

humane interior designers 

(and I know, this is not merely plural but redundant), his conjugal distraction is

relieved in the usual way, and he returns to his bride with such elation in the acquisition of two new chums as to impart it with no trace of his previous reserve. And what a blessèd convenience, that the new couple's manse must be so extensively redone.

You can well imagine my bemusement, on discovering this classic of Greene's virtually on the day of my marriage's dissolution in Santa Clara County; and such a svelte little Penguin it is, as almost the cornerstone of my decor to this day. Yet as Tolstoy says, not all alliances dissolve for the same reason; in mine, one of us didn't care for California. I beg you to believe. How enormously I'd have preferred a clever pergola for our tidepool than to have paid a pack of lawyers to leave us alone. I cannot drive down to Monterey Bay, and see the sea otters crack the abalone open on their chests, without the sense that gastronomy, too, saves a California marriage.

Graham Greene

May We Borrow Your Husband?

1967

Penguin and Bodley Head, 1969©

The LTA Suite ii: what frames the flux of perfect play?

For better than a week, a question has recurred here lightly - am I going to understand. One arrives at a new school, attends a party in an unfamiliar part of town. Asked repeatedly of pictures, how commonly is it asked as a picture?  

We confront the unfamiliar with arduous suppression of preconception but with lavish enrichment of self-conception. Who can suppose that Socrates' complaint of unresponsive texts, pictures, would assume the unanimated self? 


Greene had remarked on the gift for sensing the unfamiliar, in Loser Takes All. What diminishes the natural endowment of inquiry? But what can provoke the questioner? Who, then, is the outsider, if there is no frame of perfect play?












Graham Greene
Loser Takes All
op. cit.

Le Carré's descent from Graham Greene grows ever more plain

.. which is only to say, from Ford Madox Ford, Mauriac, and Conrad, too. Le Carré prefaced his last book, A Most Wanted Man, with this aphorism from the aristocratic Edwardian philosopher, Friedrich von Hügel, The golden rule is, to help those we love to escape from us.

Morbidly attractive to the adolescent, this precept has been a consideration in the fiction of John Le Carré at least since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and by the 80th page of his new novel, Our Kind of Traitor, we are fully aware of its liveliness in this one. A distinctively Roman Catholic perspective, its natural place in the structuring of moral suspense is inherent in a real world of patriotism betrayed by cynicism. Just think, Clarence Thomas is the most qualified man I could possibly name to the Supreme Court, and you have the measure of its application. Between governments and gangsters, Le Carré now reminds us again, only God distinguishes one's treachery from the other's.

With the end of the Cold War this writer's genius for transmitting the pain and certitude of that treachery has only deepened, reaching to Alberich's forge beneath the Rhenish surface. In the present book and the last two, he has leant with devastating vigor on the seduction of the young, in what amounts to a brilliant actuarial progress from Smiley to the ground zero of moral crime, youth at the cusp of entitlement. The place in hell where we are going now is too gorgeously contrasted with where we have been, even to be contemplated except with Le Carré's courage. I dare Barack Obama to read this book.

A brilliantly promising tennis jock mountaineer preceptor in literature - straight out of John Buchan, if the truth be known - and his uncannily pretty barrister girlfriend, reminiscent of Amanda Hesser in Cooking for Mr Latte, escape to Antigua to contemplate their mystifying romantic predicament in the wrong place. (Were this the first time for such a migration, Greece would be landlocked). At worst, you'd expect a quiet annulment down the road, but such things are nastier in Le Carré, possibly for the reason that they're never quiet, in the first place.

Greene used to insist on calling such works, entertainments. A man once sued by Shirley Temple for the candour of a film review could well have chosen a less treacherous term for his illuminations. Le Carré's embrace of that tradition is balsam for storylovers everywhere, and nothing less than patriots deserve.

George Herbert Walker Bush
July 1st, 1991


John Le Carré
Our Kind of Traitor
Viking Penguin
David Cornwell, 2010©

There's a new thing out on Kim (i and ii)

Not Kipling's Kim, mind you

(although there probably is,

I should have checked), but

Mr Philby, the soon-to-be

forgotten but until this

generation dies out, the

everyone's-favourite Kim.

Feastfodder to folioists

of foreignism at its fatal-

est. Forager for facts un-

fortunately pilfered un-

fairly, that sort of Kim.

The knicked-in-the-noggin

at Teruel while spying for

Stalin Kim, you know, our

annuity to Greene, Le Carré,

Littell and Furst. Such a

Kim there was, in Kim.

          

Possibly the new

text is not so

much about Kim as

it is about what

we'd rather never

lose about Kim,

his mystery, his

ambiguous naughti-

ness and the pros-

pect of its having

been OK because in-

herently English.

After all were not 

all the brighter 

(did I say, better?)

ones naturally cur-

ious, if anyone ever

asked?

Oh, we can be glad, to be seeing that peculiar diagnostic dyslexia of treacheries die out, the tired and ever-tenuous trope of treason in the blood of turncoat boys or twisted minds, that criminal conspiracy of conservative criticism sometimes romantically enabled by Cocteau's own conception of outlaws. All the more reason, to revisit Kim as Robert Littell has lately done, re-imagined in the fragmented shards of perspective of his closest friends. Is this there go those Littells again, this time the father of the romanceur of the evilest guy of the century, Sebastian Aue of Les Bienveillantes? Am I enjoying it? I'm afraid I am.

Graham Greene, bless his immaculately jaundiced liver, gave us the word for it, the word for this interrogation of what it is that lets us like and even join in shaping narratives drawn from life. He called our con-cords, entertainments.  I think, there is a certain willingness for history to afford us a problem play, for so long as the known facts will sustain it. Think, fossil fuels are good for you.

Did anyone reading this, happen to see the posting immediately preceding it? The occasion recalled at Thanksgiving took place in the same year, for some of the same reasons, in the same conditions of madness and fantasy, and in the same unambiguously terminal terms as Kim's flight to Moscow, escaping arrest for the highest, ineradicable treason. Possibly romantic revisionism is to history what fracking is to fossil fuels, a counter-reformation masking maladjustment. I'm reading the book with not a little of the delight I found in his son's masterpiece, of ironic trial by seduction. I am not going to use this day to argue against reading Othello.

   

iii        Andrew Westermann

iv         Benjamin Eidem

vi-vii   Jon Paul

viii      Jeremy Young

Robert Littell

Young Philby

Thomas Dunne Books

St Martin's Press, 2012©

____

NB: On Monday, 26 Nov, this following-up posting, not a customary feature of this page, was published at 7:00am, and ran until 6:00pm Eastern (US) Standard Time, when it was transferred here as a part ii of the posting given above. In consequence, a pleasant exchange in the comment section, with Tassos Paschalis, was lost. The title of this entry had been:

Lintz, whiskey, cubical

The editors at St Martin's Press have not a little to answer for, in allowing the publication of Mr Robert Littell's puckish new volume on Kim Philby with jar-ring, if not entirely misbottled orthographic affronts. The small Austrian city notorious for a style of torte and as the birthplace of the regrettable Chancellor of Germany, although redeemed by lending its name to a symphonic annunciation from the young Mozart, is given the eccentric phonetic treatment shown in the heading. In an interrogation dialogue in the Lubyanka, an NKVD bureaucrat is heard to refer to her carrel of an office, not with the noun of space planning but with an adjective drawn from geometry. 

Given Janet Flanner's novel of New York, The Cubical City (1974), pro-letarians in the publishing field might have been more sensible of our linguistic heritage. Ubiquitously, moreover, the English gentleman's beverage is spelled as if it were bourbon. In the aggregate these distractions do not leave one bilious, strictly speaking, but they do make for a bumpy night at best, in a narrative styled to be breakneck by higher means. What's regrettable is that Philby's virtuosity in risk is treated to a sordid negligence. This first edition may turn out to be an almost philatelic sort of treasure, so I'm not giving mine up; but those of any duty to the young are advised to await the second.

Will one regard the wait as worth it? I think, genuinely so. What is missing in this telling of the Philby tale has really not ever been seized, even in his State-sponsored memoir from Moscow: what was going on with you, boy? But how fair this is, everyone will under-stand. What is dauntingly enormous in Philby's treacheries is as large as Odysseus' seduction of Philoc-tetes, and yet we know countless moments in nearer lives in which a glimpse of consequences could have turned one from the abyss of wit's indulgence. Philby was an unseeing artist of the underworld, and those we love are in our charge to show the tempting space as one we know.

v   Currents at Antiparos

     Tassos Paschalis

Robert Littell

Young Philby

op. cit.